Research

Most organizations demand excellence from all, yet distribute critical resources—such as status, opportunities, and connections—unevenly, setting some employees up for success and others for failure.

When workplaces distribute opportunities unfairly, they create barriers that disadvantage some individuals and rob organizations of talent and perspective. This can be as costly to organizations as it is to the people who are disadvantaged by them.

My research asks:

1. How do our workplace contexts, routine work practices, and everyday interactions combine with psychological forces to produce persistent race and gender disparities?

2. What evidence-based interventions can organizations implement to address these disparities?

I take a multi-level and interdisciplinary approach to research, drawing from sociology, organization theory, social networks, systems psychodynamics, intergroup relations, and social psychology.

I consider conscious as well as unconscious individual, interpersonal, intergroup, and organizational phenomena, and use computational, longitudinal-archival, and field experimental methods to shed light on new ways of organizing that can enable both people and organizations to thrive and reach their full potential.

To this end, my collaborators and I establish multi-year research partnerships to identify obstacles to success for employees and organizations, and then collaboratively design and implement novel field experiments to remove them.

My published and forthcoming work includes one sole-authored paper (American Journal of Sociology, 2019), six first-author and shared first-author papers with a range of collaborators (Management Science, 2024; Academy of Management Review, 2023; Academy of Management Perspectives, 2024; Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022; Academy of Management Discoveries, 2021; and a book chapter (Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, 2019).